Governments must harness tech to drive transparency and minimise corruption

Governments must harness technology to drive
transparency and minimise corruption, argues Secretary of
State for International DevelopmentJustine
Greening

Transparency is an idea whose time has come. People around the
world are demanding much greater openness, democracy and
accountability from their governments. Transparency fights
corruption, it holds government to account and drives better public
services.

The UK Government is already global leader on transparency in
international development, but we're not resting on our laurels.
That is why we launched the full version of the Development Tracker,
which we have spent the l ast few months testing in beta. We built this tool because we
believe it should be possible for anyone, anywhere to track our aid
spending right through the system -- from the taxpayer to the
beneficiaries.

The Development Tracker allows taxpayers to do just that,
tracking how hard their overseas development investment is working,
right down to individual project level. It does this by presenting
DFID's data in an interactive infographic that people can use to
zoom in on countries to see the local districts where money is
being spent, broken down by project.

This won't just improve taxpayers' understanding of how our UK
development support is spent, but it's also a great way of helping
people in developing countries compare just how much support they
are getting from the UK. Not only that, but it gives them a tool to
see how their own governments are performing on transparency and
see how they are spending the money they get from donors.

It is not only large-scale projects such as the Development
Tracker that will help us improve our development impact. We are
also looking for new and innovative ways to use technology in our
country programmes. Britain is supporting ground-breaking
technology around the world, from mobile banking in Kenya to GPS
weather-warning systems in Bangladesh. A UK-supported text service
that warns Haitians of cholera outbreaks via their mobile phones
has recently reached a million users.

In Pakistan, British support is helping to stamp out corruption
and bribery through a simple new mobile phone service. A new public
feedback phone service set up by the Punjab Government with support
from the UK's Department for International Development and the
World Bank enables the Punjab Government to get instant feedback
from people who have used local health or other services. An
automated call from the Chief Minister asks them to call or text in
reports on the quality of their service and whether they were
forced to pay a bribe. Information from this system has already
been used to identify and scrap an unofficial one per cent property
registration tax, and ten local government officials have been
sacked for misconduct.

Britain is also leading the international drive for
transparency. This month, DfID came third of 67 donors on Publish What You Fund's
Aid Transparency Index, which lists organisations around the
world for transparency performance, including NGOs, government aid
agencies, and private foundations. We will continue to improve and
extend our aid data and use tools like development tracker to make
it go beyond data and make it become information.

Our commitment can also been seen in the leading role that the
UK has taken internationally, such as driving faster progress with
the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). The UK helped
to launch IATI in 2009, which now has nearly 200 international
organisations signed up to publishing data in an open, electronic
format.

We need to encourage the governments, NGOs and companies in the
countries where we work to harness technology in the drive to
become more transparent. This is the best way to fight corruption
and track progress. By giving ordinary people access to data and
information, they can and will hold those in power to account. We
will continue to challenge all donors to make more progress, and to
share examples of where we have been successful to help them to do
so. Because better data means better development.